Capabilities aren't very important if they aren't affordable. So maybe some government contractors can afford those things now, I don't think it would be that interesting to the consumer until SSDs get to a tenth of the cost.

News flash! We all know that cutting-edge hardware is in almost all cases too expensive. It takes time to adopt new hardware regardless of how practical it is. Once vendors acknowledge the need for such disks and once Samsung receives a boat load of orders, things will look different, but until then, it's expensive to produce because it's being done in small quantities.

I guess that the next generation of iPods will completely remove the hard drive capable devices from their line-up.

I think even the 64GB SSDs are too expensive and they've been out for a while. The 512s probably aren't made yet with those chips. I think it will become affordable eventually, but I bet that they aren't going to be using these chips, these chips will probably be history by then.I know iPods will all be flash, but we don't really know if the HDD players will be gone next year. Even if flash has a price of $5/GB next year, the 160GB model would be $800 in flash chips alone. The cost of the memory chips w

maybe they created a controller that could read and write from then simultanerously so it's double the read/write speed. I hope so cuz it better be able to beat my sata drives in read write speed otherwise I don't really care how fast the seek time is cuz any file over like 100KB would be slower to open on it than a normal hard drive.
oh yeah and I agree with the other posts. Call me when it's on its way to my budget, not just store shelves lol.

The seek times of SSDs should make it such that trying to read and write from the storage array at the same time would seem kind of pointless. It also increases the costs. It would probably go the way of FB-DIMM. FB-DIMM is supposed to allow simultaneous reads and writes to different memory cards, but it's too expensive and has other problems limiting its performance. Now, if the controller designer can apply something like that to a hard drive array, then maybe that would be nice. I think it might be p

The great thing about slashdot is that there really are some incredibly smart and funny people (two things that usually go together) here. Take the above quote for example, it is both funny and deeply profound. It is an Hall of Fame quote. Thank you, it made my day.

In case any of our dear readers don't recognise the quote, I believe the GP is ripping off Richard Dawkins whose gene-centred theory of evolution can be paraphrased as "Human beings are just genes' way of making more genes". This is top grade geek humour.

I look forward to reading the full paper in the next edition of Nature (or at least looking at the pictures).

As most of the exceptionally brilliant people have had serious personality issues and were far too obsessed with their work to do more than average or less when it comes to reproduction, I doubt progress has much to do with porn. When it comes to achievements in general though, why not? Even creationists believe that you inherit traits like eye color, hair color, personality traits and so on - the evidence is too overwhelming to ignore. Now assume you have a trait "sex drive" or "urge to have children" whic

Just wait till marketing decides to call these memory cards 550GB instead of 512GB... then other competing companies others will follow suit and call people who complain whiners and that it's an industry standard way of labeling capacity.

On that subject, whenever the 2^n or 10^n units thing gets brought up, some smart arse always says "it's so illogical to have binary based sizes like that, it's so confusing and the media doesn't work in binary anyway."

This is just history re-writing bullshit that someone spouts to get mod points and continue another meme.

There was a time when hard disks were all based on megabytes, and megabytes were always 2^20 = 1048576 bytes. NOBODY EVER GOT CONFUSED. History re-writers say otherwise, obviously. Where did it all change? Well, for hard disk manufacturers, it was a blatantly cheap trick to save 5-10% costs, and whenever anyone complained they could just to that viral history re-write meme about how binary based units were always confusing. Hell, they even convinced SI. SI have absolutely no authority or experience with determining computer units, and the "solution" they came up with is even more confusing and ugly. How do you tell if MeB or MiB is 2^20 or 10^6? Muppets.

Then came flash cards. Here's a thing a lot of people don't know: flash actually DOES come in binary sizes. That's how it's manufactured. Another thing a lot of people don't know: flash actually gets WORSE for write endurance as its density goes up. It's actually got much worse over time. To begin with, low density flash cards did not suffer much from write endurance problems - to the extent that when you got an 8MB flash card it was basically just writing straight through.

Densities went up, and you started to need a lot of spares, more error correction, and wear leveling. The result was that after formatting, you ended up with about 5-10% of your flash used up. Quite handily close to the decimal-based size. So manufacturers (and I believe SanDisk were the first to do this) silently started selling 64MB cards as 64,000,000 bytes of data instead of 67,108,864. No asterisks, no notes on the bottom of the packaging - nothing. It's fair enough, but done in a fucking deceptive manner.

I remember getting bug reports about our MP3 players (years back now) misreporting SanDisk flash cards as 61MB instead of 64MB. In the end (sigh) we put in a hack to spot deceptive cards and switch units to powers of 10.

So before anyone else spouts how the units are confusing - they weren't until manufacturers tried their damned hardest to make sure they were.

Next, people will complain about how SDRAM, caches and even registers are in silly powers of 2...

The IBM winchester line of drives from the 70s were always labels in units of 1 MB = 10^6. It is just completely false that hard drives have always been labeled using binary prefixes. Digging around, it appears that early PC/workstation drives in the early 80s were mixed. Some used 2^20, some used 10^6. In the late 80s, consumer hard drives made by Seagate, WD, etc. all converged on 2^N for a few years, before switching to 10^6 in the early 90s.

Bandwidth is always measured in 1 MB/s = 10^6 bytes/s, or 1 Mb/s = 10^6 bits/s. Should 1 MB take 1.04 seconds to transfer of 1 MB/s data link? This includes all forms of Ethernet, SCSI, ATA, PCI, and any other protocol I have looked up. If 1 MB/s does not equal 1 MB per 1 s, someone should be shot, that is just not OK.

computer RAM is the only thing that has consistently been labeled using binary approximations to the SI units. And as long as I can remember (computing magazines in the 80s) people have acknowledged that 1 MB = 2^20 is an *approximation* and that mega=10^6.

Mega=10^6 is right. mega=2^20 is wrong. End of story. It happens that it is technically convenient to manufacture and use RAM in powers of 2. No such constraint applies for hard drives, so there is no reason to use the base-2 prefixes. Stupid OSs should be changed to use the SI prefixes when reporting file sizes. RAM should be labeled using the "base-2" prefixes, but they are admittedly somewhat annoying due to lack of familiarity, and since nobody uses base-10 ram, it isn't a big deal.

Sorry, but for certain algorithms it's important that you are working in powers of 2, and that was always called Mega (Bits, Bytes, Words, whatever) or, more commonly Kilo-whatever was 2^10 whatevers.

IO has always been a mixture and compromise. Punched cards could hold 12 * 72 bits (7094 row binary) or 12 * 80 bits (column binary, but don't try to read it with the main card reader). Try to fit THAT into your "powers of 10" scenario!

For the current set of IO devices, capacity measurement was defined by marketing. I saw arguments about it in the trade journals when it was being fought out over hard disks. AFAIK, companies decided independently the choice that was, to them, most advantageous. It was powers of 10. This was not appreciated by any single customer that I was aware of. Some despised it, some didn't care, nobody was in favor. (Yeah, it was a small sample, but it's one that I was aware of. Most didn't care, and many of those weren't interested in understanding.)

But block allocations of RAM are done in powers of two, and these are frequently mapped directly to IO devices. So having a mis-match creates problems. Disk files were (possibly) created as an answer to this problem. (7094 drum storage didn't have files. Things were addressed by drum address. If a piece went bad, you had to patch your program to avoid it. UGH! Tape was for persistent data, drum storage was transient...just slightly more persistent than RAM.) Drum addresses were tricky. I never did it myself, but some people improved performance by timing the instructions so that they would have the drum head right before the data they wanted to read or write to limit lagging. (Naturally this was all done in assembler, so you could count out exactly how many miliseconds of execution time you were committing, and if you know the drum rotation speed, and the latency...So things tended to be stored in powers of two positions on the drum, unless a piece went bad.

Disks, when they first appeared, were slower than drums, but more capacious. (They were still too expensive and unreliable to use for persistent storage.) But the habit of mapping things out in powers of two transferred from drums storage to disk storage. When files were introduced (not sure about when that was) the habit transferred. This wasn't all blind habit, lots of the I/O techniques that had been developed were dependent upon powers of two. So programmers though of capacity in powers of two. This didn't make any sense to accountants, managers, etc. When computer equipment started being sold by the Megabyte it made sense to the manufacturers to claim powers of 10 Megabytes for stroage, as they could claim larger sizes. (This wasn't as significant for Kilobytes, as 1024 is pretty close to 1000.) It not only made sense to the manufacturers, it also made sense to the accountants who were approving the orders. And when the managers started specifying the equipment...well, everything switched over into being measured by powers of 10.

No conspiracy. Just system dynamics. And programmers still think of storage in powers of 2, because that's what they work in. (This is less true when you work in higher level langauges, but if you don't take advantage of the powers of two that the algorithms are friendly with, it will cost you in performance, even if you don't realize it.)

No conspiracy. Just system dynamics. And programmers still think of storage in powers of 2, because that's what they work in. (This is less true when you work in higher level langauges, but if you don't take advantage of the powers of two that the algorithms are friendly with, it will cost you in performance, even if you don't realize it.)

However, our job as professionals is to know these facts without bothering the end user with it. 2^10 is a nice and useful hack, but not something to show the end user. Computer users are no longer computer experts, and we should not bother them with internal details.

Disk capacity is reported to my mother in powers of 2. This simply does not make sense.

Technical details should not trump users. This makes us look like geeks with a binary fetish instead of professionals.

If she's not a computer professional, why is she worried about the disk size? Her question should be "Is it big enough?", not "How many bytes is it?"That said, if she's not a computer professional, the answer to "Is it big enough?" is almost certain to be "Yes", unless she's using Vista, or some other recently-released giganticaly-humongous OS. (I'm counting animators, architects, etc. as computer professionals. They have legitimate reasons to wonder whether the disk is big enough, But such people proba

Hell, they even convinced SI. SI have absolutely no authority or experience with determining computer units, and the "solution" they came up with is even more confusing and ugly. How do you tell if MeB or MiB is 2^20 or 10^6? Muppets.

I think you're doing a bit of revisionist history yourself. SI was there first. The SI units have always been in powers of ten, and have been used in all other branches of science long before there was a "computer science". It was computer scientists that originally redefined them to be powers of two, and in the computer world it was so for several decades. It was confusing but not more so than "if it ends in -bytes, it's a power of 2". Except the floppy drive which is 1.44 "MB" = 1.44*1000*1024 (1987), or the modem speeds which were reported 1 kbps = 1000 bps (1972) because that's what electrical engineers talked, or Ethernet that ran at 10Mbit/s = 10.000.000 bits/s (1980). This lead to a "bytes is powers of two, bits is powers of ten" which made all sorts of fuck-ups possible.

Yes, the HDD manufacturers did it because it was a cheap 5-10% savings, but the excuses were plenty and not all bad. It was confusing every time computer science bumped into one of the other sciences and telecommunications in particular, which inevitably used the SI prefixes. However, instead of actually fixing a problem it became only an even greater mess, invalidating pretty much every rule of thumb because the OS would invariably report something else. That's pretty much proof they didn't want to fix anything, just grab some extra profit.

After that, it was a big mess and with next to no interest in solving it. That's when the people at IEC, not SI, and certainly not pushed by HDD manufacturers, finally said that these units are FUBAR, and the only way to make a long-term solution is to abandon the SI-prefixes and make new and ugly ones, particularly the names. At that point, we're talking 50 years of computer science use against 200 years of other sciences, and with retards messing up the boundary. I think they're ugly as hell, but they're also the only way to go forward from here.

Then came flash cards. Here's a thing a lot of people don't know: flash actually DOES come in binary sizes. That's how it's manufactured.

Uh, no. You can make flash in any size you like. It's just a number of NAND or NOR cells, and there's no reason at all that they have to be in power-of-two sizes. Most of the size limits (SD = 2GB, SDHC = 32GB) are actually power-of-two counts of 512-byte sectors, but the media can be any size up to that.. any number of sectors.

The basic pages and blocks of flash are themselves not powers of two! Most 512-byte page NAND devices have some number (~16) bytes of extra area in each page for bad block mana

This is all very well but you are totally wrong. Go download a datasheet of a popular FLASH part. Guess what? The capacity is an exact power of 2.

I'm not just making this up. NAND is naturally base-2 capacity sized. Yes, there is sparing, but pages are normally 2048 byte (or larger these days) with a few extra bytes per 512 for ECC. The non-ECC areas are still power-of-2 based, and the chip area itself is square and ends up being another power-of-2 pages. End result, a power-of-2. I've been working on this

Dude... I know techies has a binary fetish, but get this:People don't fucking care about the manufacturing process or memory adressing details. Non-techies always count in powers of ten, and I and you will do nothing but making ourselves look like retards if we try to argue that 512 + 512 = 1k.

Does power stations redefine a kilowatt to 978W? Does butchers sell kilos of meat by the 1012th gram? Nope. Would I allow them to redefine these terms based their maufacturing process? Nope.

Why not just change the software to report in bits, base 10? It would make it a hell of a lot easier to make calculations in your head like "Would all these files fit on a DVD?" or "How long will it take this file to download on my connection?"In a great example of NIMBY hypocrisy in action, geeks who praise the metric system for everyone else won't accept metric units of storage capacity. Tell me: How is standardizing 'Kilobytes' (1024 groups of 8 bits) any different than standardizing Miles (5280 group

A major part of the problem is that the US is such a heavyweight in IT.
When you grow up with SI for everything, you come to expect it. Maybe people that are used to miles and gallons don't really care if you use 1024 instead of 1000.
I blame geek culture for the rest. Demanding that users adopt our binary tech-fetish because "that's how computers work", instead of following the proper standards. Our job as professionals is to handle the 2^20 conversion.
Property windows with stuff like "51,526,729,728

the notion that only the manufactures caused confusion seems unlikely at best. I doubt very much that it was as universally known as you think is was. I certainly know that as a some what geeky kid 20 years ago I could not have told you the number of byte in a megabyte BUT even if I was the only one who didn't know at that time, I can bet cash money that even here, right now, the number of people who can tell me how many byte are in 7.23 MiB (2^20) in less that 3 seconds is almost zero. Yet, i can tell you

Okay, we can pretend I am an idiot and you are one of the chosen who Knows The Truth. MY point remains: We morons out number you and you lost the battle. We morons buy a million items a day, only understand powers of 10 and just barely at that. Give up. You lost long ago and just have not woken to the fact. You can tell that you lost because you are still trying to have this conversation while the world keeps on doing what it has been doing for years ignoring you all the while.Strangely enough, once everyon

Does anybody know how well flash SSDs perform in RAID arrays? 15kRPM SAS drives are horrendously expensive so if I could plug a couple small flash drives into my RAID card (RAID 0) I'd be a happy camper. Can't find benchmarks anywhere and flash drives have horrible write speeds which means they have terrible OLTP performance.

Does anybody know how well flash SSDs perform in RAID arrays? 15kRPM SAS drives are horrendously expensive so if I could plug a couple small flash drives into my RAID card (RAID 0) I'd be a happy camper. Can't find benchmarks anywhere and flash drives have horrible write speeds which means they have terrible OLTP performance.

Individual flash chips have terrible write performance, mostly due to the slow block erase time. However, you always use multiple chips in high capacity storage devices (anything larger than an MP3 player), and you can start doing fancy tricks with interleaving, or just plain have way more buffer memory to hide the erase time. If you really want to crank out even higher performance, then you stick multiple NAND interfaces of the controller chip and drive it all in parallel.

They are truly random access devices, so you can use throughput/blocksize to get IO/s. Of course write IO/s and read IO/s are very different.I don't see the point about OLTP. Normally you don't write a whole lot of data and since the access time is virtually zero, for random writes they might still be superior to disk drives. Together with write caching that should make them very suitable for this kind of application - as opposed to streaming

The best place in a database server for these is probably something like logfiles or the scratchspace. Somewhere that gets fragmented quickly due to frequent resizing. The main data files may get internally fragmented but if they're being fragmented due to frequent resizing then your DB has basic configuration issues - preallocate main files' initial sizes larger from the start.I hope this is for a test/dev or a personal learning server; if 15Krpm SAS drives are 'horrendously expensive' for a prod

512/8 = 64 = 2^6 => 6*18 months (Moore, why not?) = 9 years. Ok, maybe that's a bit optimistic but your kids will definately have one when they go to college. Hell, it amazes myself that I'm walking around with 4GB on a memory stick these days, compared to what I started with. And no, we're not even talking floppies we're talking C64 cassettes.

SSD, doesn't that stand for Single Sided Disks, as in floppies... ; may as well...

anyways, if we had 1000 terabyte solid drives for $10 then you'd hear wining for the yet to be released Googleplex drive for $5...

Like damn, anyone using up their new 100 gig drives faster than the next size is out for less money?

To back up very large drives today, it near cheaper in time/labor and costs to just use hot swap drives, where the back up is the removed drive, plugged in and run for 15 minutes a few times a year, if even that. Or a rotation system as was done with tape.

They're getting better plus they use wear leveling, which is like forced fragmentation but there are no moving parts so it doesn't incur a performance penalty. The mean time before failure is a lot longer than your typical spinning platter drive in the newer drives.

I believe the problem is only with writes, not reads. Which, with a windows machine means that as long as there is a hardware switch to disable writes, it is more secure as well as faster to boot off a flash drive.

I believe the problem is only with writes, not reads. Which, with a windows machine means that as long as there is a hardware switch to disable writes, it is more secure as well as faster to boot off a flash drive.

It is actually not even that bad. The problem is clearing bits, not setting them, so the system can spare a small marker for every so many chunks of data and mark it as "bad" when it is unable to erase it again. Thus you don't get sudden failures of the entire drive, rather you will get a reduced

I'm not being that clever about it: using efs3 rather than any wear-leveling SSD-friendly fs, and simply minimising spurious write activity, eg by turning down verbosity on logs. And laptop-mode helps a lot of course.

Now that machine does also have a 160GB HDD for infrequently-accessed bulk data (so the HDD is spun down most of the time and a power-conserving sleep mode), and it would be good to get that data onto SSD too. But a blend, as in many memory/storage systems, gives a good chunk of maximum performance and power savings for reasonable cost.

I bought an SD card assuming that it would *not* be smart enough to do levelling. But it was fairly cheap...

And there are Linux filesystems that are designed to be wear-levelling, but I wanted one that I could simply dd from the HDD master if the memory card failed. After months of use I see no trouble at all so far. I'm sure that laptop-mode makes any enormous difference by consolidating writes.

Time to buy some stock in solid state manufacturers, perhaps... I can only foresee one evolutionary change in data storage for common home use, really. The technology is still young, but already showing lots of promise.

The price premium for laptops with even small SSD's is astonishing. Almost $1000. As much as I love the idea of an SSD laptop and ever bigger storage for phones and PDA's the price has to become realistic before anyone will buy these in volume.

There are ~31.5 million seconds in a year. If you assume that the write speed is 1 GB/s and that you were writing constantly, you would generate ~62 thousand writes to each bit. Roll the write speed back to a still unlikely ~100 MB/s(still writing constantly) and you generate about 6 thousand writes to each bit in a year.

Throw in the fact that the controllers for these chips spread writes around and you can be certain that the endurance is not a problem.

Let's imagine a daemon that updates a file every 5 seconds. That's 518400 writes a month. Most flash based storage devices are rated between 100k to 1 million writes.

Your example usage and my example usage are the two corner cases, the endurance problem and it's effect depends on what the drive is used for. Still, I just wanted to illustrate that your scenario is an optimistic one.

I was a bit vague and this is why I stated it's a corner case. It is entirely plausible that someone uses a reasonably full hard drive and updates some files a lot. Consider the scenario of simple atime updates, databases, logs, package management, emails...

This is what I ment by a corner case. I was actually quite generous since I didn't presuppose utilities that check whether a file has changed every second. The bottom line is, I can see the drive failing under relatively uncommon but normal operating c

This has been discussed before. Modern flash drives use wear leveling to avoid writing to well-worn blocks and to move unchanging files from unworn blocks so they can be used more. Yes, it adds complexity and yes it slightly delays the write process. But it's invisible to the CPU and OS and takes far less time that it would to move the heads of the standard mechanical HD. An SSD is free to organize blocks in any order in the address space because there is virtually no penalty for fragmentation.

I think you will find that even in very heavy use applications (e.g. working with HD video or using the SSD for virtual memory) that the lifespan of these drives be longer than a decade (and longer than mechanical HDs). Moreover, they will fail gracefully as blocks become tags as worn.

These devices can already do block relocates.. The MTBF on these drives is on the order of 2 million hours. WAY better than winchester drives and so far out there that I kinda wish people would stop bringing this up.

Perhaps you should get a flash media device that actually uses wear leveling. You're probably being cheap and purchasing cheap $5-$15 USB media devices, and then are curious why the quality isn't there.

A few years back, BiTMICRO published an article that arrived at a different conclusion with regard to solid state flash drive endurance in database applications. Although the write endurance rating for BiTMICRO's computations is smaller (1 million cycles), endurance ratings are much higher as a result of wear leveling methods, proprietary RS ECC and other techniques designed to prolong the life of E-Disk solid state drives. Assuming a much smaller endurance rating of 100,000 cycles (typical rating quoted by

What the hell are you talking about? It's the media and other content you need storage for. You can run any operating system on 16 GB if you wish, but whining about how big Vista is makes you look stupid.

Today's operating systems (OSX, Vista, etc) are not big because the software is bloated with meaninglessness, but because there is not a living soul out there who is considering XP, Vista or OSX but cannot get it because their hard drives are too small. Is it not obvious that developers want to make full use of the current generation of hardware?

I'm sure Microsoft could strip down Vista to something the size of 300 MB or so if only they wanted to remove drivers, icons and other graphics, sounds, media players, web browsers, etc. On the other hand, that would kind of kill the whole purpose of the operating system.

That's not a concrete example. My Windows XP was over 5 GB, Vista is slightly over 6 GB on my machine. You'd think that so many years of development between XP and Vista would make it OK for Vista to require another GB or two.

The only reason you're bitching is because you really want your entire computer to run perfectly fine on a 32 GB flash drive. Let's face it, 32 GB is ridiculously small for a hard drive even if you're running a stripped down dist of Linux. Regardless of how many GB Vista requires, y

[x] Written something reasonable and / or based in factual knowledge.
[x] Written something supportive of Microsoft
[x] Written something supportive of Vista
[x] Dissed a Lunix distro
[ ] Written something bad about Apple.

Slightly optimistic numbers, there. The USB connectors, packaging and controllers are nowhere near $15 (more like $1-$2). Even so, the $8:GB ratio only holds for small numbers. The biggest problem with flash at the moment is scaling.

Each flash chip needs board space, soldering, and bus routing. So, each chip has 20 or so (depending on bus width) bus lines connecting it. That's just for 8GB. Now for a big drive, we'll need 16 of those. That's 16 chips stuck down on the board, making it a fair large board wi